The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

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Sunday, April 15, 2018

The De-Policing of America - Mark Tapson

by Mark Tapson

A street cop’s view of the anti-police state.

Following the controversy of the recent fatal police shooting of a black suspect in California, Democrat lawmakers there have proposed a bill
that would change the current “reasonable force” standard to one of
“necessary force.” This means that police officers potentially faced
with imminent serious injury or death in a confrontation with a suspect
would be allowed to shoot only if “there were no other reasonable
alternatives to the use of deadly force,” according to the ACLU, which
predictably backs the proposal.

Law enforcement officials
representing officers who put their lives on the line every day
vehemently oppose this change. Modesto police Chief Galen Carroll, for
example, told The Sacramento Bee
that the proposed legislation “is a knee-jerk, politically feel-good
piece that will not solve the very difficult split-second decisions
officers make in very high-stress conditions.”

True, but
politically feel-good legislation that will not solve difficult problems
is the Democrat Party way, particularly where the problems of law
enforcement are concerned. Nothing characterizes the Progressive left
today quite like an open contempt for law and order. On every issue,
from Black Lives Matter to Antifa to sanctuary states to illegal
immigration and more, the left always sides with the lawless.

Exacerbating matters is a left-dominated national news media, which
perpetuates the hateful myth that racist police officers across the
country are willfully gunning down innocent minorities. The anti-cop
animus stoked by that mendacious narrative, coupled with the increasing
implementation of racial preference policies born of a social justice
agenda, have resulted in a hamstrung police force that all too often
resorts now to a strategy of self-protection known as de-policing. That
is a phenomenon in which cops avoid pro-active patrolling because they
know that if a serious situation goes down, they likely won’t have the
support of their own superiors or of the city administration – or even
worse, their leaders will actively take the side of the officers’
“victims.” The result is rising violent crime in precisely the areas
that need the most policing.

Now one retired cop is speaking out about this dire situation in a very readable new book from Post Hill Press titled De-Policing America: A Street Cop’s View of the Anti-Police State.
As a police officer in the very Progressive haven of Seattle,
Washington for 22 years, Steve Pomper was frustrated with how
“government-sponsored social justice, liberal political indoctrination
camouflaged as law enforcement training, and the lack of public
education about police work have cops constantly looking over their
shoulders.” That reflexive caution means that officers facing a
situation that could easily escalate into a career-ending debacle and a
public tarring-and-feathering in an unsympathetic news media now pause
and ask themselves, “Should I?” The answer, Pomper notes, has increasingly become, “Why should I?”

To pick just one example of what an extreme impact the current
anti-cop, politically correct culture has on an officer’s psyche, Pomper
relates the story of a female Chicago police officer who was savagely
beaten by a suspect high on PCP. She later told her superintendent that
“she thought she was going to die, and she knew that she should shoot
this guy, but she chose not to because she didn’t want her family or the
department to have to go through the scrutiny the next day on national
news.”

“De-policing should scare the hell out of every American,” Pomper
writes. “Especially at this critical time when our enemies, ISIS and
other Islamist terrorists – not to mention our own criminals – are, in
the truest sense of the phrase, hunting Americans in the streets.”
Why, he asks, “would the left engage in something so suicidal as
marginalizing police officers at a time like this? Because ideology and
politics trump all.” Bingo.

That politically correct ideology –
identity politics – is force-fed even to the cops themselves. In
Pomper’s own Seattle, for example, under a Race and Social Justice
Initiative established several years ago, officers are required to
attend social justice day camps where they are lectured about white
privilege, minority victimhood, and “how unconsciously (and consciously)
racist and bigoted cops are – especially white cops. Don’t even try to
argue; to argue also means you are even more racist. The left isn’t
interested in your point of view.” Similar programs have been instituted
on other major cities across the country.

An exasperated Pomper asks, from the perspective of an officer of the law, how can such social justice aims be reconciled with Constitutionally-guaranteed equal
justice? “Social justice favors the group. Equal justice favors the
individual… Are the police to enforce laws based on treating individuals
according to their race, ethnicity, and other nonrelevant factors to
level some theoretical playing field? Isn’t this in contravention of the
Constitution?” Well, yes, but that never stopped leftist ideologues
like Barack Obama, who considers the Constitution a “flawed document”
that stands in the way of utopian Progressivism.

Speaking of
former President Obama, Pomper is understandably not a fan of the man
whose legacy is the fanning of racial flames and a murderous animosity
toward police officers. “What are cops supposed to think,” Pomper asks
rhetorically, “when an American president invites anti-cop, [Black Lives
Matter] radicals to the White House? This is the vehemently anti-law
enforcement, pro-Marxist, redistributionist, social justice group
largely responsible for promulgating the Ferguson, Missouri, ‘hands up,
don’t shoot’ myth – you know, The Washington Post’s 2015 Lie of the Year.”

With a wry sense of humor and a pull-no-punches voice of experience, Steve Pomper’s book De-Policing America
is an honest, first-hand, Constitutionally-grounded discussion of
topics that know-it-all keyboard warriors debate routinely on social
media and in the pages of op-eds across the country: gun rights, hate
crimes, gun-free zones, zero tolerance policies, federal government
overreach, racial politics, police militarization, and many more. The
difference is that the keyboard warriors usually aren’t on the front
lines facing the real-world consequences of these issues, and Pomper's
former brothers and sisters in blue are.

How can this trend in
law enforcement be reversed? One suggestion Pomper makes is for police
officers themselves to speak out more, albeit thoughtfully,
respectfully, and with eyes wide open about the backlash they are likely
to receive, which Pomper himself is familiar with, having spoken out
against "liberal tyranny" in several forcefully direct articles
(included in the book) for the Seattle Guardian in 2010 and
2011 which drew serious flak. Apart from that, “de-policing will not
stop until trust is restored,” Pomper concludes. “Trust, but
not as the left frames the issue. Not only trust of a community in its
cops, but trust by cops in their communities that the people will
support them.”Photo: Tony Webster / tony@tonywebster.com

Mark Tapson is the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Journalism Fellow on Popular Culture, and the Center's Director of Marketing and Media.Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269850/de-policing-america-mark-tapson Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.